After America

"Theory [...] particular styles of thinking as our situation changes" (221). America, according to Eagleton, had better start rethinking our particular style of thinking. Perhaps we have, in the five years between the publication of After Theory and our election of Obama. Maybe I more fully understand why my British friends were casting their token votes for him as well.

Capitalism was highly touted when I was being educated in grade school. After all, most of us in the classroom had personal acquaintance with a relative who was only a generation removed from "getting off the boat" and making it good in the "land of opportunity". Socialism was reduced to four letters: U.S.S.R. The second "S" being socialist. This we learned was not a good word but one that threatened our very existence.

Eagleton shed new perspective on the linguistics of socialism, as well as evil, and hope. I was particulary struck with his concept "to live with sufficiency of goods but to be prepared to give them up" (184). Kinda gives Black Friday a black eye.

Maybe one version of Armagedon is for the human race to be burned on a pyre of its possessions. The glow seen in the West won't be the sun setting.

In the Trenches, Don't Ask-Don't Tell

Sedwick's discussion of a female continuum which "links lesbianism to the other forms of women's attention to women" (1685) and her conclusion that this unity 'between women loving women and women promoting the interests of women'" benefited all women(1685) contrasted with the patriarchal continuum spelled out by Hartmann where males come together "through hierarchal, establish or create interdependence and solidarity among men that enable them to dominate women" (1685).

Lilly's essay "The Love Poetry of the First World War" (Barry,144) suggests, another male continuum within the intense emotional experience of war. This becomes a literary outlet for the exploration of men loving men with "a frequent motif in these poems is to see 'same-sex love as superior to men's love for women'" (145).

The military, especially during war is seen as representing all that is "a collective symbol of the controlled virility and power of the society itself"(145). With the advent of the DADT policy initiated by the Clinton administration, we could have it both ways.

I am finally beginning to appreciate post-structuralism.

In the twelfth week I can dig it!

With Barry to guide us through the maze of four critical readings, I must admit I felt a bit smug as I ploughed through this week's assignment. There were references (within the text and the footnotes) to names I actually recognized; criticism I understood; concepts that were familiar.

Foucault, Gramsci, Bordieu, habitus, cultural capital, pantopic-the dominant language of the academy were now frames of reference. "Structures of feelings" (Barry, 173) even made sense.

Perhaps I'm just giddy over "New Historicism" coined by Greenblatt, an intellectual who actually wrote openly and made his theory available for scrutiny. A theorist who actually admits that the initial conception of his book "has been complicated by several turns in my thinking that I had not foreseen" (2).

I'm sure that on Tuesday night I will again be reduced to stumbling over the unmastered dominant language as we discuss literary canon, writing "race, the circulation of social energy, stereotype and Colonial discourse.

But for this brief moment there are flashes of recognition within the dominant language that I can dig.